• Editor
  • Option on bone to select all children

I'd love to have a checkbox on a bone (right next to 'Name' and 'Select') that, if checked, will also select all children of that bone, when the bone is selected.

Example of use: click the top bone in a chain of nested bones, and have all children selected.

:rolleyes:

Cheers

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Agree. Instead of a check box, a shortcut key mapping is enough for me. I would than map the keys like this:

Press [End] to select all bones below.
Press [Home] to move to the root bone.
Press [PgUp] to move to parent bone.

A shortcut won't help achieve what I want, which is a rig that is easier to use once 'finished' and prepared for animation.

Aren't selection groups cutting it for you? Do you have over 10 of these chains?
Tools - Spine User Guide: Selection groups

I had a project with several of these chains too and recalling sets of bones with numbers was super convenient :>

  1. I use saved selections for more important/more often used controllers
  2. imagine you make a rig and pass it to another person. They see parent bone of the chain, click, it, can animate the chain right away.
  3. if you're working on the project alone right now you have to select the top bone in the chain, expand all in the tree, shift select children, repeat many many times
  1. That's fair 😃

2-3. Perhaps selection history may help? just press PagUp or PagDown to navigate to your previous selected items, this way it's easier to reselct something you selected before. (it's a recent hotkey addition!)

Consider using less bones in a chain if you think selecting them all is cumbersome. Here's an example of the result of different combinations:
(example tip)http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-tips.php#14-bending
[/img] http://esotericsoftware.com/img/tips/14-bending-250px.gif[/img]

But also, since the rigging is done, you can just filter the tree on bones for animation, and that makes selecting abone and its children definitely easy:
select the first bone and right click it to expand it and all of its children, then use shift to select the last bone in the chain. Done 😃
Combine with the PagUp and PagDown hotkeys and it's definitely more reasonable!

Plus, we want to improve how selection work in the future, do you think these two issues may help? (especially the first, the second with some variation for chains I suppose)
Improve stored selections · #409 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor
More options for selecting bones · #482 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor

Selection panel is a little different than what booboogaga suggested. It is more intuitive to select the bone on canvas than looking for the names on a selection panel. However, the selection panel can achieve the same result if there is a toggle "Group Selection" which does exactly the same thing: "select the whole selection group when any one of the item is selected". By the way, I still think a shortcut to select current bone with all child bones is a good addition.

bir ay sonra

potential use case

Nick yazdı

the selection panel can achieve the same result if there is a toggle "Group Selection" which does exactly the same thing: "select the whole selection group when any one of the item is selected".

I've added this to the issue so it doesn't get forgotten:
Improve stored selections · #409 · EsotericSoftware/spine-editor
I think that is an elegant solution.

I use stored selections to select stuff like the hip, spine group, and arm/feet IKs. It's very convenient when animating. I don't see the need to store selections for long chains of hair/tentacles/antennae, as you don't select them that often while animating. Hence my suggestion to have an option to make children in that chain non-selectable, and have a 'select all children' checkmark on the parent bone. And yes, I can easily see a rig, where there's more than 10 chains like that.

It seems that creating a selection group and configuring the group to select all when any are selected would do what you want, but in a more powerful way because you can put any bones you want in the group


it doesn't have to be all the child bones. You could ignore the selection group in the (currently nonexistent) selection view. Maybe there are folders so you can hide it away where you don't have to see it (people love folders).

8 ay sonra

I would also love to see a one click/hotkey solution for selecting whole chain of bones. In the meantime, I have this strange behaviour: when I select a chain of bones in a tree view (select first bone then shift click last bone to grab them all), selected bones do not appear in dopesheet in the right order. There is always first bone in the first place and then the order is reversed. Like bones 1,2,3,4,5,6 are being selected and in dopesheet I get 1,6,5,4,3,2. Very frustrating as I have to click each individual bone in the tree to get them in correct order in dopesheet. Is there anything I/You can do about it?

The dopesheet order is fixed in v4.0. There is also a hotkey Select - Descendant Bones and another for selecting only the immediate children Select - Child Bones. v4.0 has 100+ more hotkeys than 3.8.99!

Glad to hear that Nate 🙂